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Mar 19, 2014

Coasts, Extreme Events, Adaptation

White House Launches Climate Data Initiative

Today, delivering on a commitment in the President's Climate Action Plan, the Administration launched the Climate Data Initiative. This ambitious new effort brings together open government data and design competitions with commitments from the private and philanthropic sectors to develop data-driven tools that communities across America need to plan for the impacts of climate change.

With the launch of the Climate Data Initiative, data from NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Defense, and other Federal agencies will be featured on climate.data.gov, a new section within data.gov that opens for business today. The first batch of climate data being made available will focus on coastal flooding and sea level rise. NOAA and NASA will also be announcing an innovation challenge calling on researchers and developers to create data-driven simulations to help plan for the future and to educate the public about the vulnerability of their own communities to sea level rise and flood events. These and other Federal efforts will be amplified by a number of ambitious private commitments.

Across the country, state and local leaders are on the front lines of climate change. While no single weather event can be attributed to climate change, changing climate is making many kinds of extreme events more frequent and more severe. By taking the enormous data sets regularly collected by NASA, NOAA, and other agencies and applying the ingenuity, creativity, and expertise of technologists and entrepreneurs, the Climate Data Initiative will help create easy-to-use tools for regional planners, farmers, hospitals, and businesses across the country—and empower America’s communities to prepare themselves for the future.